


we're like pieces to a puzzle (and we fit so well)

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Coulson-centric, Episode Related, F/M, Fluff, Introspection, Made-Up Backstory, Romance, Skye is the Best Thing Ever, Skye-centric, all the feels, wow this has a lot of sad stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 16:28:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tales of bad girls and good boys.</p><p>Written for the Skoulson RomFest 2k15 - Prompt: "pieces to a puzzle"</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're like pieces to a puzzle (and we fit so well)

She's four, unbridled and free, and she can run faster than any girl in the orphanage. _Good girls don't run_ , the nuns say, and for years she takes it to heart. Good girls don't so she stops running. She climbs trees and _Good girls don't climb trees_ , she cries for a mother she's never seen –she imagines her like the pretty ladies that come and take her playmates away, tall and blonde, always donning thick coats even in summer, she wants one of those mothers– and _Good girls don't cry_ , so she never cries, and she shouts and screams, gripped by an anger she can't understand, but _Good girls don't shout_ so eventually she stops. That's all she hears, all she'll remember: good girls don't, good girls don't, good girls don't, and she wants to be a good girl so she doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't.

He's eight, huddled against her mother's waist, hiding his face from the icy breeze, when the few people around them have already gone, the priest too. When they come back home from the cemetery he sits on his bed holding the baseball glove his father gave him last birthday. It's shiny, new, because his father never got around to actually playing with him. Her mother stares at him for a while, from the doorframe, she says _Wanna throw some?_ and he shrugs, lets himself be led to their backyard, the leaves all gone from the trees around – they are learning to recognize trees at school, that one is an oak, their neighbors have elms, Mrs Parker says he's the best of the class at it – and her mother complains they don't make baseball gloves for left-handed people but she'll manage, she smiles, he doesn't understand, people are not supposed to smile on funeral days, he doesn't think so but he goes along with it, and his mother is not a half bad pitcher.

At ten English's already her favorite subject, she likes words, what they can do, they are funny things. She's good at school, she works hard, she's been brought back to the orphanage twice and it's a bit weird, everybody says it's weird, she doesn't look like she would be a complication, and she still hasn't learned to think it's her fault. That comes a bit later, at twelve.

"He's such a good boy" the teachers say when he's eleven, twelve. His listens in class, at home he helps set the table. He is polite to everybody, he smiles, he's gotten over it admirably, his mother's friends say.

"She's such a bad girl" when at thirteen the nuns discover the packet of cigarettes hidden in her underwear drawer. She's only smoked two – not that it would make any difference, if she tried to explain, to these bitches – and it was Shelby Matthews who actually bought it, she's pretty sure she was the one to rat her out; so what? No one is going to stop her. She's supposed to stay in her room, don't even go down for dinner, but she knows the broken window by the third floor, the stairwell to the roof, she knows where the older girls hide their cigarettes, it might be cold up there in the middle of winter, but at least she's alone, in peace, and she can see the starts. If she waits it out, there might even be a sunrise, a beautiful one.

He's fifteen, finishing his bottle and throwing the tops at the wall behind the Stop & Shop, sitting on the hood of a red car, the other three boys with him are not really his friends but they know where to get beer, they know about the tiny and laughable acts of rebellion that impress a good boy like him so much, he can't come up with anything graver than kicking rubbish bins to soothe his newly-found anger. They know about staying out after midnight, and even though he knows his mother is home waiting for him, worried –"You can't keep doing this, Phillip. You're not this person" and he wondered how the fuck would she know what kind of person he was, how would he– he stays out a little longer, and a little longer, and then it's too late, way too late, and the other boys have gone already. He takes his bike – the one given to him last Christmas for getting straight As and isn't that funny now – and watches the first tendrils of sunlight slip above the horizon as he slowly walks back home.

"Maybe you just need to try harder," the nuns say. "Have you really tried?" and she knows enough about irony to choke back ugly laughter at them.

He wants to belong so much, and he finds the place, and it's inside his first girlfriend's bedroom, smoking and making out and then she checks the time and says "Phone your mother if you're going to be late for dinner, like a good boy," laughing, and he untangles his fingers from her hair and follows her orders, smiling a promise as he walks out of her room.

She's fourteen, deep black mascara, listening to Marylin Manson's cover of "Tainted Love". She's getting too old for the orphanage and they –who's they? who has her life in their hands? Always feeling like there's a shadowy presence dictating the rhythm of her days, like it's not her choice at all– are thinking about moving her to – well, nobody calls it a house for troubled kids and she didn't think she was one of those but uh, what do you know.

Sixteen years old and "Are you wearing makeup?" her mother asks, amused, him pouty, arguing, "It's not makeup, mom, _it's punk_ " so dramatically, but this is much better, better than the nights where he made her wait for him well into the night, better than the few months of bad company; they argue about music mostly, these days, generational differences, she's Motown – "The Supremes got me through some hard times"– and he has a poster of Debbie Harry in his room and is predictably adolescent about it but yeah things are better, things are finally good for the first time since he was eight.

At fifteen love means the taste of cigarettes in Nico's mouth, skipping classes and sneaking him into her bedroom, bodies on fire with every touch, the last foster home she'll ever have, because "Good girls don't" and who would ever be interested in giving a girl like her a home.

He's seventeen, moving boxes out of his mother's parents' garage. "What's this?" he asks and he and her mother take a peek at a cardboard box filled with what seems to be old magazines. Some are in Italian. "Your grandpa's. From the war. And his _Captain America_ comics, he loved those, he was like a kid, reading that stuff." He puts them back in the box but, curious, he will remember.

The night she escapes the orphanage she's still fifteen and she runs through the garden and the backwoods and into the city, remembering she shouldn't run but she does oh she does.

He's eighteen and the two scholarships fall through all of the sudden. The doctors call whatever his mother has – and no one seems to agree on what that is – _chronic_ and he knows that word means expensive and for the long run. He graduated in the top five of his class but he's looking for a job when Nick Fury appears in his life and tells him, "I'm not gonna lie, son, my employers take advantage of situations like yours" and he offers to pay the hospital bills.

Her life is internet cafes and working behind the bar serving drinks she's not legally allowed to drink.

It doesn't take long for him to realize that there many people more intelligent than him in here but he's probably the smartest guy in his class at the Academy. It's not ego – it's a bit ego – and it doesn't mean he doesn't have to spend more time in the shooting range than his classmates, smarts don't mean he has the same skills as people who come directly from military academies or are in-house legacies. He tries hard; guys like him, they always have to try harder than the rest.

She's eighteen the first time she hears the name SHIELD, and it's really pure luck. She's nineteen when she finds the redacted file and she starts to dream about her parents again – she hadn't since she was a kid – worst case scenarios, horrible and intimate family tragedies or high treasons against governmental agencies, her parents criminals or victims and good girls don't have backstories with censored documents in them.

"Thank you for coming, sir," he tells Nick Fury because it would have even been more depressing if only he had showed up today. His mother had no family she still spoke to and no one comes to the funeral when she dies, three weeks after his twenty-first birthday. She dies in spring, all the leaves on the trees. "You're a good man," Fury tells him. Yeah but. He looks around. He wonders how many people would come to his funeral.

"There's someone you want us to call?" the nurse asks after they have bandaged her arm. She grits her teeth at the question more than at the pain of the injury. She doesn't have health insurance or even proper documents. The accident wasn't her fault but she was driving without a license. "No one," she says, used to the idea that no one in the world would care if she lived or died, but finding the official interrogations around it annoying. "Your family?" the nurse asks. She shrugs, thinking there must a warrant against her already and she has to slip out of here before the cops come.

The first time he loses someone under his command it's the first time he watches someone die in front of him, he's twenty-nine, the guy is thirty but two levels below, a stray bullet to the neck and he bleeds out all over his hands, his clothes. He's never felt as powerless as when he feels the man's pulse slow down under his fingertips and he's suddenly glad he wasn't there to watch his mother die.

She's always been good with computers but then she gets really good, weirdly good, _scaringly_ good, and like the ghost of Christmas past she begins to track down some of her foster parents, the one she wishes had kept her, the ones who hurt her beyond repair. She's not going to anything evil – she just wants to ask _why_ , what was so wrong with her, why didn't they, why did they. She never does, of course –she's not a complete psycho, and even at her worst she harbors no desire to become a stalker– she never shows up at all those adresses she collects for about a year (the _really bad year_ , if she had to put it a name) and keeps like some sort of security or a good luck charm.

"You've always been slow about this stuff, Phil," his subordinate says, kissing his cheek, packing her things for her next mission, in a unit other than his. She's a little too brilliant, a little too free, she would scare him in all the right ways if he would care to look too hard at her, but he doesn't. She's worked with him for three years and he's not exactly slow but this is SHIELD, this is the only place he could ever belong to, now, and he doesn't mess with that stuff, the team comes first, the mission comes first, even if he could love someone like this he could never choose someone like this, he turns the word _complication_ in his mind, uses it as a way of goodbye, dry lips pursed together, careful not to say anything incriminatory, something essential and intimate about him already locked away for good, something's missing, and of course he never sees her again.

"Who's the tool blocking my access on that last one?" she screams at twenty; she's a mess, her chances of winning the competition –she needs the money, she needs a freaking car– go bye-bye. A guy stands up from the opposite row of computers, tall, and handsome like a movie star or a rodeo cowboy, and says "My name is Miles Lydon, but you can call me _tool_. Can I buy you a beer?" and he slips through the firewall.

Thirty-nine and he watches as his best friend's marriage desintegrates in front of his eyes and he's always going to take her side. "You were right," May tells him. "We have to choose this life or the other. People like us can't have both". He touches her wrist, watches her face, hardened so quickly after Bahrain, despite his best attempts, that he can barely recognize her, he says: "I didn't want to be right."

She's twenty-one, half-drunk, saying "I don't know who my parents are – I don't know who _I_ am, really" and she rests her head on Miles' shoulder, lips dry, lips pressed to the fabric of his denim shirt and his already-familiar smell and realizes he has no idea how big this is, why she needed to be drunk for it, how she has never told anyone this before. At twenty-one love means this.

He's forty-six and he's a torturer; there's no other word for what he does. He spends his days in a top secret facility listening to people begging him to kill them. He spends his nights – whenever he can – with a woman who still thinks he's a kinght in shining armor, one of the good guys. And good guys get women like this one: talented, funny, warm, sophisticated, with that neck, a woman who throws her arms around him and asks "How was the day at the office? Did you save any damsel in distress again today?" and laughs about it. He can't laugh; he can just smile at her and kiss her and pretend he's not one of the bad guys, pretend he deserves her.

Twenty-two, twenty-three, she's already erased herself and the skies open over Manhattan. The name SHIELD is on everybody's tongues. She's no longer chasing a ghost, a high level security ghost. She's not crazy. 

Forty-eight and he dies. He doesn't get a funeral.

Everything else is a dead end and at twenty-three she is holed up in a friend's joint in Lexington, waiting for him to close, she's run out of options, she turns to Miles and says "I have another plan" and she thinks, well, if she can't come to SHIELD, maybe she can get SHIELD to come to her somehow.

Tahiti. Weak, sweet cocktails he wouldn't think of drinking except here, this sun, this postcard picture. He closes his eyes, lets his physical therapist take him away from here. When he wakes up it's still virgin sand the color of saturated travel brochures, days long and pleasurable, only the ugly scar on his chest a reminder of what pain used to be like. This should feel like paradise, and it does but – 

Los Angeles. She lives in her van. Holding her breath when she hears someone messing around outside her door. After the third time they try to break in she finds a safer place. Luck is a 24-hour diner and love is the emails she writes at three in the morning, lonely and frustrated, to Miles. Words words words. Her podcast get more and more confrontational. Words words words. But then again words are all she's ever had.

At forty-nine he hears her voice for the first time. It's a recording and she's insulting his organization, the organization he has given his life to, his life for, she's calling people like him _tools_ and he takes it personally, like – and this is absurd – somehow she's speaking to him. She's insulting him and it makes him smile and he has no idea what's coming for him.

She's twenty-four and she thinks she likes this guy's style.

How do you thank someone for pulling you out of hell? For holding your hands and pressing her head against your chest and smiling in relief like you being alive is the best thing that's ever happened to her, like it actually matters if you live or die? He doesn't know. He doesn't know how to explain about hell to someone like Skye, someone who is looking at him like that, so he makes a tight fist around the still-warm metal of the bracelet and he lies to her.

It normally goes like this: she is alone for this kind of revelation. She's used to the taste of bitten-back tears in her throat, but she's not used to someone being there to comfort her afterwards – touch her face, hold her hand. Like she deserves it, like she's not the cause of so much pain and death. Today, after the storm, it goes like this: "No," she tells him, "I get to rewrite it."

He's forty-nine and he finds himself with the blood of a young woman in his hands, his shirt, the nice tie he bought from Paul Stuart last time he was in New York, he's snot sure why he thinks about that, her blood on his clothes, why he thinks about the comparative weakness of Asgardian staffs to this sort of hit, he is trying to count the days he's known this girl and the total sum is ridiculous and that's when the doctor says "I don't agree with this decision" while the technicians prepare to move Skye back into the Bus, and he looks at the woman, he knows she's a SHIELD agent before she's a doctor – they all are, SHIELD-agents-before this, SHIELD-agents-before that, and he is too, he should be making SHIELD-agent-before decisions and he's not, he's fucking not; he tells her "It's fine, this is my call, I take full responsibility". _Full responsibility_ , and looking at the way life drains from Skye's face second by second, it sounds like a joke.

At twenty-five love doesn't mean this yet but it could mean this, the tin man with a tender heart, the super spy who's still a little boy afraid of his brother, tall and handsome like a movie star, the one who makes her fight to get a smile out of him but when he does smile at her she feels like a million bucks.

He's fifty and his whole world falls apart.

She's twenty-five and she watches as one of her best friends lies in a hospital bed, lies in a coma, because she was too soft. She watches for hours.

Fifty and his hands are tired, not getting any sleep, permanently jet-lagged, lonely, in charge of the organization he gave his whole life to, his life for, wondering if he is a good enough man for this, sometimes wondering if he's a good man at all, permanently exhausted from keeping her away, missing her, not knowing how to do this any other way, knowing exactly what the hell is wrong with him.

The little, old voice in her head telling her this is why you shouldn't have expectations of people, they will betray you, but he was always different, he was always the constant, he might have faltered at times but he never left, so she doesn't understand, she can't understand, why he's stopped talking to her (the little voice saying _she_ must have done something wrong, but she doesn't listen to that one anymore). She knows he would never do that –not when he knows, not when he has seen what that sort of stuff has done to her, and not _now_ of all times– he would never ever, so she realizes something is not okay here.

Fifty-one and he gets to live, he gets to remember what he did to other people, the torture, the injustice, the bad decisions, the road paved with good intentions, he gets to hear Skye say "you did the right thing", he gets to get better, he gets to live, he gets to think about the future, he gets to – 

Good girls don't bring ancient cities down with their superpowers.

He should be thinking about the mission, the bigger picture – that's what he's for, anyway, that's the role he belongs to, not grand gestures like seeking death in a mythical city because he can't bear to leave her alone. Afterwards he thinks that was bit ridiculous of him, a bit out of character of him – which character? – but he can't stop thinking about her.

She should be thinking about Trip afterwards, about her father, about this _gift_ she doesn't want, how she's a risk, _she's a risk_. She should be thinking about anything else really. She can't stop thinking about him.

"I'm tired of funerals," he says much later, and at fifty-one this extraordinary woman he's tired of seeing get hurt presses her mouth against his.

The way he says her name after she kisses him for the first time, she's twenty-six, the world has such a fragile grip on itself, the world seems to be hers to destroy, to break, with her own hands, and the boldness of this good man, standing so close to her, letting her kiss him, kissing her back, saying her name _like that_.

He likes the way the woman he loves fits into his lonely bed, fits into his life, into him, when he's fifty-one.

At twenty-six love means pressing the palm of her hand against his scar and thinking _Home_.

Twenty-six and they drive to her old orphanage ("I didn't know it was abandoned", "Yeah, you would have liked me at sixteen", "This was the old school I went to", "Thanks for coming with me"); fifty-two and they finally visit his father's grave (he says nothing on the way back; he keeps remembering the way she held him in the cemetery, pressing her forehead against the back of his neck) and all that wasted time and all that anger and the things he thought he had to keep locked away and maybe it was all worth it because there was going to be her at the end of it all.

He says, that night: "I believed I had to choose between this life and the other one. I didn't know I could choose you."

That night she feels guilty about her youth, she touches the lines of his face, knowing what they hide, she kisses his brow – she says: "Sorry I kept you waiting for so long."

She's twenty-six and she says "These are the rules: first, don't call me that name" but her father keeps forgetting, keeps apologizing, keeps trying; twenty-seven and she twists her fingers into his bloodied shirt, pleading as she watches him die, crying as he calls her _Skye_ for the first time. She's all alone again.

Fifty-two and another funeral, but this time he hasn't lost anyone, so why does it feel as if he has? "I would have liked for him to be with my mother," she says, "but he never told me where he had buried her" and that's the saddest thing he's ever heard, until that night, when they get ready for bed and she takes his hand and presses it against her breast – "I guess I'm an orphan again" and he kisses her desperatedly because she has to know, she has to know, she's an orphan, yes, but she has a family, she will always have a family, it's right here.

"Good morning," and it's the next day, her eyes are a bit bloated from crying and from not crying and he's already made the coffee, a little humble breakfast, not to make a big deal, but to make a gesture, he does that, he likes doing that for her, twenty-seven and she finally fits, the thing they always told her bad girls don't do, fifty-two and he holds her hand over the kitchen table and the good boy finally belongs to someone.


End file.
